Jewish organizations reacted with great dismay to a ruling by the Ghent court in Belgium on Tuesday to acquit Flemish best-selling author Herman Brusselmans on charges of Holocaust denial or trivialization, racism and incitement to hatred.
The complaint against Brusselmans came after a column the satirist penned in August for the Humo magazine about the situation in Gaza. “I get so furious that I want to ram a sharp knife down the throat of every Jew I meet,’’ he wrote, inter alia.
According to the court, Brusselmans “did not exceed the limits of the punishable,” and it ruled that “there are no criminal offenses.’’
In his ruling, the judge referred to free speech. “The court recognizes that certain members of the Jewish community could take offense at some sentences in some columns, but emphasizes that the right to free speech protects the author’s expressions of opinion.”
The president of the European Jewish Association (EJA), Rabbi Menachem Margolin, strongly condemned the court decision, calling it “a deeply alarming message about the state of the fight against antisemitism in Belgium and Europe.’’
“Today, the Belgian justice system has established a grave precedent: hate crime laws are flexible—and when it comes to Jews, they suddenly become malleable,’’ he stated.
For Margolin, the ruling “sets an unacceptable precedent: it effectively legitimizes a person, read by hundreds of thousands, to openly call for the murder of Jews without facing any legal consequences. It deems it permissible to publish in a national media outlet the desire to “stab a knife into the throat of every Jew encountered,” all under the pretext of anger over the situation in Gaza.’’
“By issuing such a verdict, the Belgian judiciary sends a dangerous message: incitement to murder and hatred can be reinterpreted, excused and ultimately legitimized—at least when the targets are Jews.
“Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of any democracy, but even freedom of speech has limits. That limit is crossed the moment it is used to harm, incite and endanger another group in society—regardless of their background. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to spread hate and antisemitism. When the justice system legitimizes incitement, it erodes the very foundations of democracy itself,’’ he said.
The EJA called on the Belgian government “to take responsibility.’’ ‘’Urgent legislative reforms are needed to close any legal loopholes that enable such morally and legally indefensible rulings.’’
Michel Kotek, chairman of the Jewish Information and Documentation Center, which lodged a complaint to the Belgian government, said: “This is a disgrace to Belgian jurisprudence. If someone has been making such statements since 1993, then we are no longer talking about an incident. This is a constant repetition of moves in which antisemitic statements predominate.”
“We too are for freedom of speech,” he added. “But where it spills over into hatred and the deprivation of safety, that’s where a government must intervene. And that’s where it fails.”
Originally published by the European Jewish Press.
